Outlaw

How to spell outlaw

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce outlaw

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does outlaw mean?

1. nounA person who has broken the law and is on the run, especially a fugitive beyond the reach of legal protection.
2. verbTo make something illegal or to ban it by law.

Outlaw in a sentence

• noun

  The famous outlaw robbed stagecoaches across the territory.

• verb

  The government plans to outlaw the sale of these chemicals.

• noun

  A reward was offered for the capture of the outlaw.

• verb

  Several countries chose to outlaw the practice entirely.

Where does outlaw come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

This is one of the relatively rare everyday words that English took from Old Norse rather than from Latin or French. The Norse word was utlagi, formed from ut meaning 'out' and lagu meaning 'law' (literally 'a thing laid down or fixed'), so an outlaw was quite literally a person placed 'outside the law'. In Anglo-Saxon and early medieval times this was a precise legal status, not a romantic one: a court could declare a wrongdoer an outlaw, stripping away all legal protection so that anyone could rob or kill the person without penalty. English adopted the term during the Old Norse contact of the Viking age, and it kept the transparent out plus law structure that makes it easy to spell once you see its two parts. The later verb sense, 'to make something illegal', grew naturally from the noun, since to outlaw a thing was to put it outside the protection of the law. The same lagu root also sits quietly inside the modern word 'law' itself.

How the word is built

• out- (outside)
• law (from Old Norse lagu: a thing laid down, a rule)